Businesses and other concerns are continuing to look for better and more cost-effective ways of performing marketing campaigns as well as managing customer relationships. With improved communications technology and the development of the World Wide Web, direct marketing campaigns are often performed “on-line”; that is, marketing is performed by communications over a data network, such as the Internet. Such communications are often in the form of electronic mail (e-mail) sent directly to potential customers. Alternatively, as users browse through various websites, advertisement banners are displayed on various parts of the web pages being viewed by the users.
Improvements in technology have also made collecting customer feedback more convenient. For example, if a customer wishes to express a complaint or to provide some other type of feedback, the customer is able to send an e-mail directly to the customer service center of the respective business, in addition to or instead of calling the customer service center by telephone. Another possibility is that customers are able to access a feedback page provided by a website of a business, with customers being able to type in their feedback directly into a comments box in the displayed web page.
Traditionally, customer service representatives have to manually review the feedback provided by customers to determine whether customers are satisfied or not with goods or services provided by a business. For large businesses, the amount of feedback can be massive, and the amount of resources that are needed to review the feedback of customers or users can be quite large and costly.